Synaeresis arts + poetry
Vol. 4 No. 5 Issue 12
Beliveau Books STRATFORD
Synaeresis : arts + poetry Vol. 4 No. 5 Issue 12 ISSN 2371-6940 ©2020 Beliveau Books All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, with the exception of excerpts for the purpose of literary review, without the expressed permission of the publisher. Published by Beliveau Books, Stratford, Ontario Email: beliveaubooks@gmail.com Publisher website: https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/home Magazine site: https://andreasgripp.wixsite.com/synaeresis Distributed by Beliveau Books, Stratford, Ontario Editor: Andreas Gripp
Front/Preface/Postscript/Back photos: Andreas Gripp
Text font for poetry is Calibri 12pt.
Publication Date: July/August 2020
CONTRIBUTOR James Deahl Fizza Abbas Dan Welcher Claudine Cain John Di Leonardo Heidi Slettedahl Jennifer Wenn Andreas Gripp Vikram Masson Mark J. Mitchell Meg Smith Ace Boggess Carrie Lee Connel
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James Deahl New Eden A vernacular harshness emerges where once we clung to Eisenhower’s calm strength to see America through Korea’s aftermath and desegregation’s wrath. Our infected language shelves off into vicious gossip where only Furies rage. Lowell once spoke of the mausoleum in the Republic’s heart. Now a graveyard for lost dreams is all most find in Washington. Our garden’s overrun. The mulberry and the wisteria wrestle upwards for the same scrap of sun. Grey squirrels uproot our geranium, despoil our Eden.
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Heavy Weather One warm day, maybe two, now whiplash rain bends the wild garlic double and my wife’s geranium trembles like some drunken midnight rambler. As with poetry, the tempest pushes us to our limits: what must be endured usually blesses. “People get the government they deserve,” someone said. Floodwaters flush the otter from her hole, and the wind shows no mercy. Out on Huron, sailors seek safe harbours. Waves churn along breakwaters, rise above walkways where lovers often stroll into sunsets. Ghost laughter tingles through the storm.
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Nestlings As though the gods of rain and chill connived to keep our farmers off their sodden fields, June begins where May concluded: with storm after storm. Today we start to wonder if summer will come at all — too much land remains unplanted, too much work undone. I am told it last rained like this the spring of nineteen forty-five, my year of birth. Acres Dutchmen laboured years to drain lie awash in muck as if Lake Huron would swallow crops, barn, and house. A robin bathes in the downspout’s puddle. Her nestlings watch, their baby wings too young to try to fly.
James Deahl currently resides in Sarnia, Ontario. Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, he made his home in Canada in 1970. He’s the author of 30 literary titles, the most recent being Travelling the Lost Highway (Guernica Editions, 2019). He recently edited Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century, published by Lummox Press of California, an anthology presenting current Canadian poets and their work to an American audience. Along with his daughter Shona, he is presently translating the work of Québécois poet Émile Nelligan into English. The poems published in this issue of Synaeresis are from a forthcoming book of poems, Earth’s Signature.
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Fizza Abbas High School Prisoner Unlike my friends, I don't want to lie down on an old, wooden bench that reeks of college days. The scent of newly-painted classroom walls and the wiggling of white chalk will remind me that there was once a period in my life where I wanted unsolicited attention from the teachers to win a make-believe game they designed just for me. I still believe photosynthesis is a process to make food, and plants are an exception to this. Space is a hieroglyph, that you too can create. Epic of Gilgamesh is a fabric of reality. Poetry can provide you with an armor that can save you from the world. I still wonder why I went to high school when I could climb the walls of curiosity— the thick, retaining panes with a cavity in-between. A perfect echo chamber for whispering vines— on my own. 4
Fizza Abbas is a Freelance Content Writer based in Karachi, Pakistan. She is fond of poetry and music. Her works have been published at many platforms including Indiana Voice Journal, Poetry Pacific, Runcible Spoon, Better Than Starbucks, The Poetry Village, Bonnie’s Crew, Cabinet of the Heed, The Blotter, and Foxglove Journal.
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Dan Welcher Plague Mantra — a villanelle The most important thing is just to breathe— a simple task, yet one we often fail to notice. If we can’t, we’ll have to leave. We gesture coyly; “Nothing up my sleeve,” we say, although that absence leaves a trail. The most important thing is just to breathe. The air can be so heavy, it can wreathe itself right past our lungs. This makes us pale. They notice, and they tell us we should leave. The plague continues. There’s no time to grieve. We shun the virus, seek a holy grail to show us, once again, just how to breathe. But others fear us, tell us to bequeath our masks and sanitizers to the hale so they’ll survive, and we’ll be told to leave. But we’re not going. This you must believe: we’re not about to quit, or rend the veil. The most important thing is just to breathe. Here’s notice: we can do it. We won’t leave. 6
In 2012, the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented to Dan Welcher an Arts and Letters Award in Music. The citation reads, in part, “As intense as it is elegant, Dan Welcher's music takes his listeners on a surprising yet inevitable path . . . Every work in his wide-ranging catalogue is written with the strongest musical signature.� That catalogue now numbers well over 140 works in every conceivable genre, including three operas, seven concertos, six symphonies; plus vocal literature, piano solos, and various kinds of chamber music. Born in 1948 in Rochester, New York, Dan Welcher is now one of the most-played composers of his generation. He has taught at the University of Louisville, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Texas at Austin, from which he retired in 2019. He now lives half the time in Texas and the other half in St. Marys, Ontario.
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Claudine Cain the divine attributes of blue it is the mother of black and grief it is both water and air and the beloved of my roots it is the only color that sings in nature and through memory in the voice of blackness it brings rain and bears witness chasmic blue black—makes waves and banishes droughts under pressure, it removes whitewash and makes skies for flying
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Ariel Spring time sweet and summer’s trill, boom of angel eyes with a heart so new it’s clean as bone snap. Breathes love like moon blessed flowers, blooming agape with mindful precision. Moves in gusts, scattering icicle holds with the jut of her chin. Her child self, croons out of cigarette smoke, Puff, detox, puff, detox, clean. Forming waves on her nose before sifting through the butts. Born of stillness, penning hand, as men drive by brandishing white and dirtied hoods, points blunted by time and truth, in the glare of Ariel and all this light. Across the street, foxes scatter, divorcing themselves from the defamation of network imposters. Ariel settles into the mantle of mother growing meadow. Witnessing the blush of sky, witnessing flowers speaking Rabi to feed the green of air.
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Claudine Cain lives in North Carolina where she attends UNC Greensboro. She is the former editor of Black Elephant literary journal. Her fiction, art, and poetry have appeared in Riggwelter, Eunoia Review, Dime Show Review, Public Pool and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in The New Verse News. The collage she created, which accompanies her poem Ariel in this issue, is entitled For Ariel In Rise and Song (2020) while the collage she made which appears on page 8 of this issue is called Queen Mother In Bloom (2020).
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John Di Leonardo Of Love and Other Invisible Things Official union, auspicious smiles on designer silks, tuxedoed ties gorge on greetings, and sweet icings but first sign on the dotted line that they may stamp you permission to glow as one, on all these dutiful eyes
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John Di Leonardo The Visit Slips in among morning thoughts a balm whispered, through bamboo chimes infuses blood as spring, blooms flame to fable as a mourning song of rose, a blush laved faint by fevered melodies, our flush an incessant tune, pulsing still to fill itself in us
Transience, beauty and the conceptualization of the nude body within Canada’s artistic identity are key themes in John Di Leonardo’s current studio practice. His figurative images oscillate between abstraction and realism, while his work explores questions of the nude image as a contentious landscape in the history of Canadian art, and how its tradition as object of desire and shame informs the trajectory of our social constructs, values and identity. John Di Leonardo is also an ekphrastic poet whose most recent book of poems, Conditions of Desire, was published in 2018 by Hidden Brook Press. Born in Italy in 1953 and emigrating to Canada in 1964, he currently resides in Brooklin, Ontario.
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Heidi Slettedahl My Phantom Child Failure is signified by blood my blood The phantom kickings that never were slide out with blood and cramps and tears My phantom child, with eyes like mine and hair that curls just like your father’s does Your pudgy fingers, ten in all, and perfect crescent fingernails They’re real, so real to me I’ve felt contractions in my sleep the urge to push, to grunt and to expel to want the pain your birth creates to welcome it, a pain that ends (not like this one) miraculously
Heidi Slettedahl is an academic and a US-UK dual national who goes by a slightly different name professionally. She has been published sporadically in small literary journals including Picaroon Poetry, Vita Brevis, Dream Noir, Red Eft Review and I Want You to See This Before I Leave.
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Jennifer Wenn Notre-Dame Is Burning Notre-Dame is burning, so the news says. Here, a radiant blue dazzles from above, crisp, chill midday air cradling the promise of vernal renewal; an ocean away acrid, sallow plumes churn skyward, first flickers of flaming roof animating the early evening. Notre-Dame is burning. My adolescent avatar was there thirty-seven years ago, passed through the overpowering Gothic faรงade from bustling streets and glaring sun to hallowed hush and glimmering devotional candles, gawped at the great rose windows iridescing the morning light, trooped with the other ogling tourists around the adamantine immensity. Notre-Dame is burning, the breathless reports and looping videos flash around the world, 22
a modest miracle of timing in the fallow between Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. Notre-Dame is burning and already the question: how? and already the speculation: renovations gone disastrously awry, some electrical fault, or maybe a carelessly flung cigarette butt. Notre-Dame is burning. Conceived in 1160, two hundred years in gestation, a monumental gesture of hope and faith, awesome architectural heirloom, witness to a vast historical pageant, gazing impassively through the centuries on the wealthy few and the innumerable misÊrables, time’s shifting tides accreting onto the spiritual symbol many other meanings. Notre-Dame is burning overhead while first responders, 23
priests and specialists rush to remove and pack and desperately pass glorious art and priceless artefacts down a human chain and out to safety. Notre-Dame is burning, great jets of triumphant fire streaking heavenward split the gathering dark, grotesque smoky billows metastasize from white to orange to yellow to green to glowering black under the horrified stares of a growing flock praying, singing, filming, despairing, hoping, stunned at the sight of their pride and joy, an ecclesiastical masterpiece become heart of a secular nation, being ripped out and incinerated. Notre-Dame is burning, the nineteenth century spire become soaring torch, then plummeting into the raging inferno engulfing the timber-forested crown. 24
Notre-Dame is burning, survivor of endless religious conflicts, desecration, revolution, hundreds of years of neglect, the agonies of two World Wars, its shocking denouement seemingly suddenly at hand. Notre-Dame is burning, and where would Quasimodo be? I wondered. No doubt guarding the precious bells, haunting the hundreds of firefighters pouring on water from far below and making a stand in the twin towers, defying destruction’s fiery grasp. Notre-Dame is burning, but the conflagration is fading, the inestimable roof beams logged from trees long-gone from France now a pile of ash, yet the life’s work of uncounted medieval stonemasons still standing strong, 25
their shades shoulder-to-shoulder with those wielding the hoses. Notre-Dame is burning, gently, but searching lights reveal the wondrous stained glass still intact as well, the famous organ wounded but a survivor too, those candles flickering on. Notre-Dame was burning, but will, it is vowed, be gloriously renaissant, fortunes formerly withheld suddenly free to re-form and reimagine the individual, collective and digital memory, meld modern with Middle Ages, defying time and history’s edict that all things must pass. Notre-Dame was burning, but now is calling for me to return, this time not to pay homage to a frozen monument, 26
but to bask in a living metamorphosis, to feel it all happen again, twenty-first century craftsmen imbued with the spirits of their distant ancestors, mortality breaking bonds and striving upwards to touch immortality.
Jennifer Wenn is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario. Recently published is her first poetry chapbook, A Song of Milestones (Harmonia Press). She has published poems in The Ekphrastic Review, Open Minds Quarterly, Tuck Magazine, Synaeresis, Wordsfestzine, Big Pond Rumours, LOCP Fresh Voices, Wordsfestzine, and the anthology Things That Matter, and has written From Adversity to Accomplishment, a family and social history. She has also spoken at a wide variety of venues. Jennifer has a day job as a Systems Analyst at Canada Life and is the proud parent of two adult children.
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Vikram Masson Days of 1968 This woman would dress in a sari—blood orange, purple, green with dappled marigold—and walk fearlessly through the smoldering projects, past the camouflaged National Guard, flaming garbage cans, striding Panthers armed with batons and pistols, amid howls for justice and placards blazoned Black is Beautiful and Burn Baby Burn. This woman, a doctor—all 95 pounds of her—ignored the warning of her German-American superior who daily repeated, be careful when walking to the clinic, as he pushed up the gold-rimmed specs that dimpled his nose. This woman saw the pain of Newark burned to the ground, its tamped-down anger frothing up in the angry crowd. The Panthers would say, let her through, she’s a healer, and the crowd would let the sindoor-streaked woman into the clinic with unwanted pregnancies, tubercular children, shotgun wounds. And this woman, my mother,
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would remember 1947—how the streets used to burn for Indian freedom, how her brothers ripped down the statue of a British nabob who peered down arrogantly at Indians. She learned solidarity, and we learned the bloody history of America around the kitchen table.
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They are all in their Late 70s They are all in their late 70s. They massage their replaced hips and stand to the snap and creak of over-pounded knees. They eat rich food— curries, biryanis, and sweets with rosewater and heavy cream— and drink expensive whiskey cooled with a black stone. Those who are not yet speaking to voices talk of their plans, eyes shining like moons nested in brown wrinkles. And how they gossip! None think that perhaps— or at least they don’t say so. I am the only one filled with dread. I see Lord Yama—his shadowy fang-face, how he comes like a purple cloud, and imagine the noose tightening around my torso, not wise enough to know what the elders seem to know.
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Carousel Ride You asked, Shall we ride on the carousel? in the grounds ringed by pines and firs, beneath a mottled grey sky. I hoisted the children onto horses streaked like candy canes under a canopy marred by tacky cherubs and warily climbed on a white-pink stallion next to you. The carousel creaked to a start, and the children’s laughter welled up in the air as they spied their torsos multiplied in mirrors. You glanced at me and puckered your lips as you bobbed in an airy circle, calm as a hurricane’s eye, your winds spiraling for now in the distance, lashing the green depths of the forest.
Vikram Masson is a lawyer by training who lives near Richmond, Virginia. His work has been featured most recently in the American Journal of Poetry, Glass, The Blue Mountain Review and Prometheus Dreaming. He is working on his first book of poetry.
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Mark J. Mitchell Night Lesson After machines have gone to sleep, their red eyes blinking off, armored souls start to move— slowly as infants— trying to touch the lost sense memory that turns night to morning— and rolls the moon back below a pink horizon. Clocks will do their work while you try to remember what prayers are for.
Mark J. Mitchell was born in Chicago and grew up in southern California. His latest poetry collection, Starting from Tu Fu, was just published by Encircle Publications. A new collection is due out in December from Cherry Grove. He is very fond of baseball, Louis Aragon, Miles Davis, Kafka and Dante. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the activist and documentarian, Joan Juster, where he made his marginal living pointing out pretty things. His work has appeared in various publications including Good Poems, American Places (Viking/Penguin), The Comstock Review, Santa Barbara Review, Buddhist Poetry Review, Plainsongs and The Lyric.
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Meg Smith The Largo Faire I came to find you so we could drown in the colors of the sea. The sky is dissolute, purple blood and wine. My world was falling. Train tracks ran alongside this strange, white house. I put pennies on the rails. So much fled in one blur of copper. So much died in the whistle, the thunder of wheels, the blur of rust and waning sun.
Meg Smith is a writer, journalist, dancer, and events producer, living in Lowell, Mass. Her publication credits include The CafĂŠ Review, The Horror Zine, The Starlite Virtual Poetorium, and Atlantic Currents: Connecting Cork and Lowell. Her most recent poetry books, Pretty Green Thorns, Night's Island, This Scarlet Dancing and Dear Deepest Ghost are available on Amazon. Her short fiction collection, The Plague Confessor, is scheduled for publication this upcoming Autumn.
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Ace Boggess Advice for Watching Jeopardy! with Others Prepare by reading classic poems you remember in that way you might recall having chickenpox or broken your arm while roller skating: recognize it happened, can’t reconstruct agony or a single line of cursing. When POETRY flashes above the ocean grid, someone beside you will shout, “You should get all of these!” as if you’ve memorized Emily Dickinson’s eighteen hundred fascicles or each gentle musing sighed by Bashō. To everyone else, you’re the expert, although you haven’t read James Wright in years, preferring the more modern likes of Billy Collins, whose name is never the question for an answer on Jeopardy!
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His poems seldom end; they fade like pop songs from the 1980s, which is a category you’d dominate, then regret, unable to exorcise earworms after summoning.
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The Last Time You Were in a Crisis before you heard the Honorable Mechanic pronounce sentence, send your car to the gallows; before hours of waiting, ripped nails & cuticles; before the tow truck; before ten suggestions of what went wrong—you were crossing the Interstate bridge, & your motor blew. two miles from home on Thanksgiving night— thanks for not dying, you think, & thanks for an exit ahead & the crawl uphill at five miles per hour. if there’s a devil, his name is Stress, & you’ve made offerings, your skin stirring to the razor cut out of nowhere in a lightless alley. how many times have you driven this road? how often have you swerved, survived? you’ll look back into that moment of transit, & shrug it off as though a nightmare, haunting noise, creepy glimpse of a dead man’s name on the caller ID, another passing scam the universe played.
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Ace Boggess is author of five books of poetry—Misadventure, I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, Ultra Deep Field, The Prisoners, and The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled—and the novels States of Mercy and A Song Without a Melody. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, River Styx, and many other journals. He received a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts and spent five years in a West Virginia prison. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia.
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Carrie Lee Connel Edward and Jane for C.K. You disagreed when I surmised Spiritualism in Jane Eyre, that the book was written before the rappings in Hydesville, not far from Rochester, New York. I demurred, and my mind still returns to Jane’s second flight across the moor, led by an ethereal voice, familiar. When the door to the cottage opened, Mary ‘started as if she had seen a ghost.’ Even more so on Rochester’s part, as once reunited, he does not believe Jane a creature of flesh and bone. I imagine you murmuring, “Gothic tropes.” I should have said, “Swedenborgian influences,” but lacked this knowledge at the time. Spurred by your correction, my collection boasts the works of Lodge and Crookes and James; of Bates and Evans; Tweedale and Hudson; and three volumes by Arthur Conan Doyle. I see now that Rochester, in his injured state, sent forth his astral projection in search of Jane.
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She, sensitive and clairaudient, followed to Ferndean Manor, seen by the dimmest light. Whether we call it one or the other, neither can deny what J. M. Barrie claimed: “Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.”
Carrie Lee Connel lives in Stratford, Ontario, with her husband and two cats. She has a Masters of Library and Information Science and a BA in English Language and Literature from Western University. Her writing has been published in Synaeresis, The Toronto Quarterly, Fterota Logia 1, Tales From the Realm Volume One (Aphotic Realm), Smitten, NOPE Horror Quarterly (TL;DR Press), Piping at the End of Days (Valley Press), and Moonshine: A Canadian Poetry Collection (Craigleigh Press). She’s the author of three published books of poetry including her newest, Written In Situ (Harmonia Press, 2020).
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Andreas Gripp Haight-Ashbury The temperature in our apartment is always moderate, 20 Celsius, or as our friends in San Francisco call it, 68, never too frigid, too torrid, as pleasant as its people who birthed a twentiethcentury love of gay and poetry, where Ginsberg howled and Ferlinghetti keeps the city lights plugged in, grateful for their dead, their ‘67 just a narrow notch before some elusive ideal that hovers within our reach. You tell me to never touch the thermostat and I acquiesce. What we call warmth is but the middle, the centre of some utopia absent of fire and of ice. Yes, the ground there occasionally quakes, much like our walls and ceiling do whenever the tenants upstairs argue about the bills or break into a dance we’ve been curious to behold.
The Way in Which I Prefer My Demise: by drowning in the Pacific, not because it’s pleasant, (like dying in my sleep during some subconscious, midnight reverie), this under-the-surface suffocation, but for the reason that if I ever did come back, as the Buddhists and Hindus say I will, I’d want to live in the sea, its relative calm and serenity, its teal and aquamarine, with humans seldom to be seen, my hands but fins and a caudal for feet, and death, should it come calling once again, taking merely as long as the cavernous gulp from the orca’s great hunger.
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New from Beliveau Books
New Poems by Carrie Lee Connel. 87 pages, perfect-bound. To order, please visit: https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/books
New from Beliveau Books
New poetry by Andreas Gripp written in Stratford where the author now resides. 54 pages, perfect-bound. To order, please visit: https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/books
New from Beliveau Books
An anthology of selected poems from Afterhoughts magazine https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/books
Also Available
Poetry by Jennifer Wenn. A Song of Milestones is the author’s poignant gender journey. 30 pages, perfect-bound. https://beliveaubooks.wixsite.com/books
Synaeresis current & back issues can be easily read and downloaded at the Synaeresis: arts + poetry website:
https://andreasgripp.wixsite.com/synaeresis
Synaeresis current & back issues can be easily read and downloaded at the Synaeresis: arts + poetry website:
https://andreasgripp.wixsite.com/synaeresis
Synaeresis current & back issues can be easily read and downloaded at the Synaeresis: arts + poetry website:
https://andreasgripp.wixsite.com/synaeresis